The agreement was concluded by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns. From an official release:

This agreement will enable the United States to further diversify the crucial transportation routes and decrease the amount of time needed to move troops and critical equipment to resupply international forces in Afghanistan and to bring needed supplies to the government and people of Afghanistan. This will permit 4,500 flights per year. The new transit routes will save the United States government up to $133 million annually in fuel, maintenance and other transportation costs, and this agreement is free of any air navigation charges. By providing access to these transit routes, the Russian Federation is enabling a substantial increase in the efficiency of our common effort to defeat the forces of violent extremism in Afghanistan and to ensure Afghanistan’s and the broader region’s security.

Mr. Bakiyev said in an interview with the BBC this week that “the doors are not closed” to talks with the U.S. about the base. He declined to discuss what kind of talks he was prepared for and said none were under way.

Later, a presidential spokesman denied that Mr. Bakiyev’s comments meant he was backing off on his decision to close the base. “The decision on the base is final,” said the spokesman, Almaz Turdumamatov. By August, “every last American soldier will have left the territory of Kyrgyzstan,” he said.

You know the song I mean.

Intriguingly, the Afghanistan supply dilemma could provide potential for a diplomatic opening to Iran, which recently completed a road linking the Afghan towns of Delaram and Zaranj to southern seaports. The San Francisco Chronicle quotes Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University, as saying: “I certainly think it [the road] represents an opportunity, particularly because it kind of takes up this relationship where it was last at its most amicable: that is, over Afghanistan.”

Pentagon and State Department officials have been frantically calling the Kyrgyz government to get it to reverse the decision — and it appears the parliament is delaying a vote on kicking the United States out — but now a delegation led by Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns and the White House’s Russia specialist, Michael McFaul, are on their way to Moscow to deal with the patron as well as the client.

U.S. officials said they still hoped to persuade both Kyrgyzstan and Russia that, even though there are alternatives to the Manas base, its continued use would be most beneficial to Afghanistan’s stability. They also said they were open to Russian ideas about how cooperation in Central Asia can contribute to a better U.S.-Russia relationship.

Expect horsetrading, in other words.

Still, dealing with Karimov is unseemly. The Wall Street Journal reports that alternatives to both Manas and Karshi Khanabad include bases in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — neither of which are flourishing liberal democracies, but also aren’t egregious human rights violators to the degree Uzbekistan is. Both, of course, are much further from Afghanistan than Uzbekistan is. Not that I know the first thing about how to determine what is and isn’t a suitable air base.

Well, the first stage is denial. But the second stage — acceptance — appears to be dawning on American officials.

From The New York Times:

A senior State Department official said that negotiations with Kyrgyzstan over the base had been halted and that the alternatives under consideration included bases in Europe and the Persian Gulf, as well as a possible expansion of existing bases in Afghanistan. [...]

The senior Defense official said the closure “has all the earmarks of being a done deal.”

The Russians basically paid more money — $2 billion in loans — to the Kyrgyzstan government to deny the U.S. access to the base than Washington pays to lease it. Charmingly, The Times reports the Russians “took pains on Wednesday to reassure President Obama that they hoped to cooperate with him in Afghanistan and elsewhere.” Defense Secretary Bob Gates has told the Senate that he’s exploring ways to expedite the deployment of up to 30,000 new U.S. troops to Afghanistan ahead of this summer, which is currently the earliest they can get there. How will that happen without the only regional supporting airbase? Russia’s first gift to the Obama administration has been an elbow to the solar plexus.

Planes at Manas Air Base after returning from refueling operations over Afghanistan (manas.afcent.af.mil)

The U.S. might lose access to a crucial hub for supporting the war in Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, Russian news sources quoted Kyrgyzstan President Kurmanbek Bakiyev as saying that he had decided to cancel U.S. access to the Manas Air Base, one of two regional air hubs for resupplying U.S. troops in Afghanistan used since the war began in 2001. The United States had lost the other, a base in Uzbekistan called Karshi Khanabad, in 2005 after the Bush administration criticized the Uzbek regime for human rights abuses. As a result, the U.S.’s reliance on Manas has increased to the point where it has become the “primary logistics hub” for the Afghanistan war, providing a staging ground for both troops and materiel, as Air Force Col. Randy Kee, the commander of the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing, told journalist Nathan Hodge in 2005.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

That may come to an end. “Literally just days ago, the Kyrgyz government made the decision on ending the term for the American base on the territory of Kyrgyzstan,” President Bakiyev told Russian state television during a Tuesday visit to Moscow. The Russian government agreed on Tuesday to provide Kyrgyzstan with a $2 billion loan package, plus $150 million in direct aid — apparently part of a long-standing effort to dislodge the United States from an area it considers within its sphere of influence. By contrast, the United States pays Kyrgyzstan about $60 million annually for use of Manas.

Manas is home to a “24-hour operation” supporting the Afghanistan war, said Vikram Singh, a South Asia expert at the Center for a New American Security who served in the Pentagon during the Bush administration, hosting fuel tankers, cargo and attack aircraft and medical evacuation resources, among other materiel. “This is not a small operation,” he said, adding that the loss of Manas could lead to a reduction in the tempo of military operations. “There’s no way to quantify it, but if you’re a commander on the ground, you’ve got to think that there are several things that aren’t available to you.”

Anthony Bowyer, director of the Central Asia program at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a nongovernmental organization focusing on strengthening democratic governance, called the possible loss of the base a “diplomatic victory” for the Russians. “There was tremendous political pressure on President Bakiyev by the Russian Federation” to kick the United States out of Manas, as the Russians are wary of long-term U.S. intentions to host large numbers of NATO troops near its southern border.

Just two weeks ago, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, Army Gen. David Petraeus, visited Kyrgyzstan and told reporters that the U.S. would retain the base. “The highest-ranking official I met with gave his assurances that the issue of Manas was not raised during his discussions in Russia about possible economic cooperation and assistance,” Petraeus said on Jan. 19.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters that the United States was still in negotiations to retain the base. “It is a hugely important air base for us,” Morrell said. “It provides us with a launching-off point to provide supplies to our forces in Afghanistan.” He would not comment on whether the United States would consider Russia’s efforts to dislodge it from Manas to be a hostile action.

The issue of logistics resupply has proven to be a difficult one for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a country characterized by mountainous terrain and few paved roads. Land-based supply routes for U.S. and NATO troops that run through Pakistan have come under increasing attack in recent months. On Tuesday, Taliban guerillas destroyed an important bridge through the Kyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan used to resupply NATO forces.

Another Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Wright, said the State Department had not informed the Pentagon of any changes in status to U.S. access to Manas and appeared to downplay the prospect of its loss. “We have multiple supply routes, both air and ground” to resupply U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Wright said. “It’s important not to put your eggs in one basket.” He said he would not “give specifics” on the amount of supplies moving through Manas or if there were alternative air supply routes that could handle a comparable load. Bowyer noted that Petraeus’s recent trip through Central Asia had also taken him to Tajikistan, raising that neighbor of Afghanistan as a prospective alternative to Manas.

A State Dept. spokesman, Rob McInturff, said that the agency “has not received formal notification to close the base directly from the [Kyrgyz] government.” McInturff confirmed that U.S. diplomats will “continue to discuss the base with the authorities” in the central Asian country, but said there were no efforts as yet to dispatch any additional U.S. senior officials to underscore the importance of keeping the base. He said that the Pentagon was “very highly involved” in the “ongoing discussions.”

John Pike, a defense expert with Globalsecurity.org, a military analysis organization, said that it was conceivable that Tajikistan’s numerous Soviet-era airbases could be alternatives to Manas. “The challenge is the politics,” he said, noting that the Russian invasion of Georgia this summer — a country that Moscow feared had drifted too far out of its sphere of influence — would make former Soviet republics “tred carefully” before signing deals to host U.S. military supplies.

Additionally, Singh noted that it wouldn’t be as simple as picking up from Manas and moving elsewhere. “There are lots of places that technically could” host U.S. forces, he said, but “there’s been substantial investment into upgrading [Manas] so it can support” the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. “It’s not just like saying, ‘Thanks — Dushanbe, we’re ready to go,’” referring to the capitol of Tajikistan.

“What this shows is how precarious it is running military operations in a landlocked country” like Afghanistan, Singh said.

Manas is the only regional airbase the United States has access to for Afghanistan outside the country. As the Associated Press notes, the United States lost access to its the so-called “K-2″ air base in Uzbekistan in 2005, the only other aerial resupply point alternative, which the United States had leased. For at least three years, the United States and the Kyrgyz government have been working out payments for the expensive base, all while the Russians have been pressing the former Soviet Republic to get the Americans out. If these reports are correct, the Afghanistan war just got a lot harder.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Wright, says that the State Department hasn’t sent any notice to the Pentagon of any impending changes about Manas access, and couldn’t confirm these early reports. Wright continued to say that there were “multiple supply routes, both air and ground” to keep resupplying troops in Afghanistan, but wouldn’t get into any specifics about rerouting in the “hypothetical” case of losing Manas.